A new study sheds light on an ongoing development that gets more heavy-handed by the day: big-box broadcast networks painting illegal immigration in the most positive hue possible while wholly ignoring its destructive impact on American citizens. The Media Research Center (MRC) on July 24 published a report detailing how ABC, CBS, and NBC’s “flagship evening newscasts prefer to cover the crisis from the perspective of illegal immigrants.”
‘Failed to Report on a Single Crime’
“MRC analysts examined all broadcast coverage of America’s immigration crisis that aired between October 1, 2022 and July 20, 2023,” the organization wrote. “Since our previous update in October of 2022, the big three broadcast networks have aired just over 254 minutes of border crisis coverage on their evening newscasts. However, less than 15 percent of that airtime (14.6%) discussed the issues posed by the massive influx of uninvited illegal aliens. For example, only 1.9 percent was spent on the massive amount of illegal substances being smuggled into the country.”
The old saw rings true: What is not reported is every bit as important as what gets aired.
“Throughout all 254 minutes of border coverage, [the networks] never once used the terms ‘illegal immigration,’ ‘illegal immigrant,’ or ‘illegal alien.’ They also failed to report on a single crime committed by an illegal alien who had entered the country during this period,” MRC noted. Instead, copious amounts of airtime were devoted to sympathetic portraits of fragile “migrants” who just want to better themselves. The networks also are not averse to openly lecturing viewers on the correct way to see things. “Whatever you think of the crisis at the border, it’s important to understand the reason so many have made this journey. They’re both running from something — violence, oppressive regimes, poverty, famine — and towards something: the hope of a better future,” NBC Nightly News anchor José Díaz-Balart said in a May 13 broadcast highlighted by MRC.
Infinitely worse than this hardboiled propaganda is the sad realization that the dominant establishment’s silence on the dark side of mass illegal immigration is not restricted to its media wing.
Who Is Keeping Track of Illegal Immigration?
(Photo by Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images)
On July 26, Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies testified before a joint House subcommittee hearing on the “human cost” of the Biden administration’s overt refusal to secure the porous southern border. Bensman made clear that it is not just broadcast networks willfully turning their gaze away from illegal alien crime but local and state governments and the federal goliath in Washington as well.
“Illegal immigrant crime is notoriously difficult to measure because doing so is politically aversive to government agencies in politically liberal precincts,” Bensman testified. “Most US states do not keep track of crime committed by illegal immigrants, and neither does the federal government. Only Texas tracks much of its crime by noncitizenship and its data is likely indicative of crime trends in other large-population states.”
It should be shocking to the core. Tens of millions of illegal aliens have been allowed to pour into American communities, and no responsible government agency is keeping accurate track of the mayhem they bring with them. Texas is the sole available resource to mine here, and the findings are not pretty. Bensman continued:
“The Texas Department of Public Safety learns the immigration status of suspects booked into local jails through a program that submits fingerprints to the FBI for criminal history and warrant checks, and to [the federal Department of Homeland Security], which returns immigration status information on those whose fingerprints were already on file (which is not all of them).
“The glimpse is limited and not a reflection of much almost certain higher totals, but it is telling about the trend line ahead across America. Between June 1, 2011, and July 31, 2022, these 259,000 illegal aliens were charged with more than 433,000 unnecessary, preventable criminal offenses. Those included 800 homicide charges (resulting in 374 convictions as of July 2022), 822 kidnapping charges (resulting in 265 convictions), 5,470 sexual assault charges (resulting in 2,593 convictions), 6,485 sexual offense charges (resulting in 3,065 sexual offense convictions), and 4,945 weapons charges (resulting in 1,723 weapons convictions).”
Now extrapolate those figures across the nation, to small towns forced to take in illegal immigrants and the major cities overwhelmed by an endless wave of them. The American people are bearing a menacing burden, and things are only likely to get worse as the Biden administration finds ways to allow more and more into the nation’s interior. The ignorance is readily harnessed for political advantage.
They Call This Reporting
A 2018 ABC News “Fact Check” of then-President Donald Trump showed how the game is played. The would-be takedown of Trump’s claims of high illegal alien crime rates used the lack of accurate accounting as a way to “debunk” him.
“Here’s the problem: There is no national database that compares crimes committed by immigration status,” ABC News wrote. “In fact, only one state – Texas – does so. That means there’s no national database that breaks down crimes committed by native-born citizens or immigrants, or those in the country illegally, making it difficult to confirm or dispute the president’s numbers.”
ABC did not stress the need to resolve this “problem” by calling for detailed recordkeeping on illegal alien crime. Instead, it had no other choice but to fall back on “available studies” – and promptly cited a report by one of the most notorious pro-illegal immigration think tanks in the Swamp. ABC presented as evidence against Trump a 2018 study by the cheap-labor-loving “free market” Cato Institute, which conveniently concluded that “overall, crime rates are lower among immigrant groups than they are among native-born Americans.” Heard that line before? It is the mantra big-box media organizations and pro-illegal alien politicians have been beating like a drum for years.
To borrow a phrase from ABC, “here’s the problem.” The Cato study’s author is Alex Nowrasteh, a prominent advocate for unchecked mass immigration into the United States. In a remark made during an interview with the Centre for Risk Analysis in September 2021, Nowrasteh, the man ABC leaned on to “disprove” Trump, declared that the benefits of massive immigration more than made up for the deaths of American citizens at the hands of any terrorists who might be part of the floodtide. “There are always gonna be some [dangerous individuals] who come through,” Nowrasteh conceded. “And the risk from that, in terms of higher crime or higher terrorism or anything, is very manageable in the way it is. So I would say we could have much higher levels of terrorism from immigration and it would still pass the cost-benefit test.”
Congratulations, American citizens. You are now nothing but a unit of cost to the advocates of mass immigration. This is the other side of the fluffy pillow that is ABC, CBS, and NBC’s loaded coverage of illegal aliens.
